The newly released market analysis and forecast report of active optical cable (AOC) and embedded optical module (EOM) indicates that the scale of both markets will grow steadily in the next five years (2022-2023), although AOC will be a little less dynamic than before.
The latest report forecasts that global AOC shipments in 2022 will be about 30 percent higher than the previous year's forecast. However, revenue forecasts for 2022 are down 18 percent from the previous year's report, due to lower prices and higher demand from single-aisle AOC. The global AOC market will grow to $547 million in 2023.
The Chinese and other data center operators often use single-channel AOC to connect the servers to the first tier of the exchange, so they've upgraded their expectations of the single channel AOC needs. At the same time, Chinese data center operators usually do not use AOC to connect switches, which inhibits the potential demand for Ethernet four-channel AOC commonly used in such applications.
According to the report, the high performance computing (HPC) and field data center is quick to adopt 100G AOC, and HPC sector this year is expected to start to the 200G AOC development. However, the market research firm does not see the same enthusiasm in the data center market for the use of 200G Ethernet AOC.
As for the EOM market, analysts say the technology is well on its way to a decent growth trajectory after a bumpy decade. In its latest report, EOM's shipments are expected to rise about 20% from a year earlier, while revenue is up 29%. The report's authors expect revenue rising to $543 million in 2023.
